Power and Protocols

Let’s take a minute to
consider the politics of protocols, because politics are more likely
than performance to determine which protocols are actually used and
which remain only theoretical.

Protocols have value in proportion to the number of users: a widely
used protocol gives you the desirable ability to communicate with a
large number of people. So when a protocol has enough users, it tends
to attract even more users. Let’s call this the
snowball effect, because a simple snowball thrown down the side of a
mountain can grow to be an avalanche. The snowball effect
doesn’t take into account whether the communications
protocol is high performance. Just being able to communicate at all
with huge numbers of people is valuable. This is exactly what
happened with HTTP. It’s not a particularly
efficient protocol, but it has provided great value through its
ubiquity.